Cross Country

It was certainly a good decision to go to Mt Cook yesterday because it was back to rain again when we woke up.

Quite discouraging to do anything, really. Looks like we were a little spoiled from the first two weeks on the sunny North Island.

Right around the corner was a little shopping plaza with a few cafes where we had breakfast.
We used breakfast and the complementary wifi to work out the plans for the next four days, which shall be my last four days in New Zealand.

Tired of all the rain we decided to try to get to the east coast in hope that the weather was a bit better over there.

As we still had four days time to get back to Christchurch from where I would have to take my flight to Hawaii we took the scenic route south a little bit and then along the Waitaki river towards Oamaru.
On the way we stopped a this little place that had cave drawings. The amazing thing of these cave drawings however was that they were relative recent.

Local Maori people drew them only 170 years ago and they included animals, trees but also a European sailing boat.

The normal road soon became a bit too boring for us explorers and we spontaneously turned onto a pass road, just because we saw a sign for it. We had a vague idea where it was going to lead us but not how long it would take, nor what the road conditions were.

It was a very curvy gravel road and much longer than we expected.

We only saw three cars during the 3 hour detour but it was worth it as we got to see some fairly lonely and remote areas of inner Canterbury.

Back in civilization we stopped for petrol and food in Palmerstown.

In honour of the famous cashew nut incident of 2014 in Nepal I had a huge Cashew nut and chicken Pizza.

We actually wanted to stay in Oamaru for the night but all but one Motel had no Vacancies and the one that had, probably had vacancies for a good reason by the looks of it.

On the next couple of kilometers north we started call Motels in Geraldine, which was suppose to be a nice little town to see if anything was available there.

One of the ladies told me the entire town is booked out and we should better try in some larger cities along the way.

We said we'll give it one last try and... yes we got a place. Not a very nice or at great value but it was a place in this supposedly nice little town.

I was still quite full from the pizza but we still went out to find a nice bar to have a beer and maybe some snacks.

There was not much going on in Geraldine. No cars or even people on the road, all shops were closed, no one in the local hotel. What were all the people doing that had booked all the other rooms? Why was this strange little town supposed to be so nice? Maybe we'll see tomorrow.